RAND to US Army: embrace nanotechnology

from the look-who's-paying-attention dept.
Senior Associate Calvin Shipbaugh, RAND physicist, writes in Army Logistician, the official professional bulletin of U.S. Army logistics: "If a full assembler actually can be developed within the next 10 to 20 years, and a useful replicator follows shortly thereafter, then an impressive capability for logistics sustainment will arrive during the third decade of the new century. It is critical that the Army become aware of breakthroughs in assembler developments as they occur. Lack of vigilance by the Army in monitoring developments could create big problems in a short time…In the Army's Science and Technology Master Plan, nanotechnology is identified as one of the Strategic Research Objectives (SRO's) of the AAN [Army After Next initiative]…In order for the coming revolution in technology to be applied smoothly to the Army, the RML must embrace these developments.

Leaders in medicine look toward nanotech

from the now-here's-some-vision dept.
In a Perspective on "The Next Pharmaceutical Century", Chemical & Engineering News (subscription req'd) gives great quotes on nanotechnology-based medicine from two leaders: William Hazeltine, chairman and CEO of Human Genome Sciences, and Richard Klausner, director of the National Cancer Institute. Hazeltine: "The fusion of atomic-scale engineering technology with our bodies will enormously enhance human performance." Klausner: "Ultimately, what I think is a fantastic challenge is to link molecular sensing technologies with nanotechnology…" Read More for the full quotes.

Bill Joy advocates common sense, not banning research

from the what-happened-to-the-God-part? dept.
Lew Phelps brings to our attention a Wired story on Bill Joy's talk at the Pop!Tech2000 conference: "Joy said that while such technologies [robotics, nanotechnology and genetics] offer much, including freeing many from poverty and 'grinding physical labor,' there are also inherent dangers. Although some have misinterpreted his arguments as calling for a ban on some types of research, Joy said he is simply calling for a return to common sense. 'Reason taught us how to develop these tools and if we donít use our reason to manage them, we do so at our own peril,' Joy said during his one-hour address." CP: From the conference program, it appears the focus of Bill's talk was spirituality, God, religion, and the soul, although these weren't mentioned in the Wired coverage: odd.

MIT's Rod Brooks: "strong nanotechnology" = sf

from the Rod-please-cut-back-on-the-sf dept.
MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks writes at Edge.org : "Strong nanotechnology, the version that is most popular in science fiction, has molecular machines which can manipulate matter, disassemble arbitary raw materials atom by atom, and build copies of themselves. We do not know whether the physics of our universe allows such machines to exist, or whether self reproducing machines need to use the molecular mechanisms of biology and must be on the order of billions of atoms in size…We have no evidence that non-biological nanotechnology machines will even in principle be able to manage energy supplies, manipulate single atoms in arbitrary ways, break down raw materials, both decode and copy a description of themselves, implement the computational resources necessary to control their behavior, and avoid being ripped asunder by the presence of other nearby matter. We have no clue when we will be able to answer whether such machines can exist, even in principle. Worrying about whether nanotechnology machines might "get away" from us and eat the fabric of our world, or evolve to do so, seems to me to be on a par with worrying about how the world will fare with the screwups in temporal consistency that will occur once we have figured out how to build time travel machines. Another topic popular in science fiction."

Molecular switches get connected at Liverpool

from the first-the-Beatles-now-nanotech dept.
Bryan Hall points out that Environmental Network News is running a UPI story : With the flip of a gold molecular switch, scientists moved a step closer to bringing nanotechnology, with its promises of cell-sized robots, ultra-dense computer memories and other wonders, to the real world. The creation of a switch 1,000 times smaller than a red blood cell, described in the British journal Nature, goes to the heart of the electronic industry's drive toward faster, more efficient components…The ease of fabrication of these switches, which can be made to self-assemble, is crucial in nanotechnology, the scientists said. "It must be stressed that what we have done is to demonstrate a principle…Integration and communication to the external world will depend, in our view, on a confluence of technologies that is currently developing." The Nature journal article requires free registration.

Money for info on prior art to stop bad patents

from the reform-through-online-coordination dept.
Senior Associates Jeff Bezos and Tim O'Reilly, along with Charles Cella, have a new project: "BountyQuest is the world's first high-stakes knowledge marketplace, on a mission to strengthen the patent system. We pay large cash rewards to people who can help find evidence critical to issues of patent validity. BountyQuest revolutionizes information searches by connecting the experts who have the information with the people who need it through our "Broadcast Reward System·" Simply put, BountyQuest offers monetary rewards for hard-to-find information. We support an on-line community of scientists, engineers, and professional researchers who have valuable knowledge that can help their field, their industry, and the world community. BountyQuest's first mission is to reform the patent system by providing the prior art searches required to insure that only true innovators have patents." Thanks to Bennett Smith for this pointer.

Nanotech jobs & job candidates: post 'em here

from the let's-play-nano-matchmaker dept.
Foresight is often asked about how to find a job in nanotech. Pat Delany reports that Nanospot, the targeted search engine for nanotechnology information, now offers classified ads in these categories: Positions Available, Available Candidates, Equipment Available, Equipment Wanted, and the always-useful Other: " We promised this long ago but had more trouble than we could have imagined finding affordable, secure software that actually works…and ended up almost rewriting this one…Our search engine now includes well over a thousand academic department and research group sites. A year ago we could find only about 200. We started the search engine as a way of giving wide access to academic papers. Is there any way you can help us get the word out?"

Rhetoric heats up among nanotech researchers

from the it-can't-be-done-today-so-it-can't-be-done-ever dept.
Garrison Hamrick points out a Knight Ridder wire service story. Excerpts: "Meanwhile, Dr. Smalley, and many other academic scientists, say that basic research being done today doesn't reflect the original Engines of Creation vision. "I call it the silly side of nanotechnology," Dr. Smalley says. Dr. Vicki Colvin, another Rice researcher, adds that "to a chemist, the idea of a molecular assembler is anathema"…Harvard University chemist George Whitesides [argues] "We certainly cannot build a self-replicating robot at any size," he says. "The idea of building one on a nanometer scale does not make sense"…Dr. Evelyn Hu, an engineer at the University of California, Santa Barbara [opines] "I think what Drexler was talking about, what Richard Feynman was talking about," she says, "is a vision that is still ahead of us with all its positive, beneficial aspects and all its scary aspects." CP: It appears from the article that those attempting to critique the assembler concept are attacking a straw man, i.e. a proposal that no one is making. Note also that the engineer quoted has a sense of time; the others use the present tense only — typical.

Protecting ideas from being patented

from the stop-the-"Enclosure"-of-thought dept.
Foresight is looking at the question of how to make it easier to protect one's inventions from being patented. Such ideas must be publicly disclosed; see IP.com for one approach. Senior Associate (and computer security expert) Norm Hardy reports: "I wrote this note about two years ago. It is about just the subject that you raise. It is also an example of ideas that we wish to protect. Most of our ideas relate to software; however, I see no reason that protecting programming ideas and nanotech ideas differ in this regard. In addition to the ideas presented it seems feasible to pay AltaVista or Google to index the site or sites with the ideas. Google can even qualify searches by URL."

Big excitement in biotech? Nanotech

from the boggling-profit-potential dept.
In a Morningstar.com item on Yahoo Finance, biotech expert Cynthia Robbins-Roth advises on investing in her sector: "I think that the big excitement will be in two key areas…The second arena of incredible opportunity lies in the so-far untested uses of biotech to create devices that don't yet exist. Nanotechnology, driven by a molecular understanding of how our cells work in sickness and in health, can lead to the creation of new approaches to cell engineering and transplantation. For example, the only real cure for diabetes will require the creation of a device that acts just like a real pancreas, one that would need to respond on a second-by-second basis to changes in blood sugar levels. Imagine an engineered pancreas that sits in the body and responds continually." Yes, and hurry it up please, 'cause some of us need one now. (Or a heart, intact spinal cord, etc.)

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